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Hello Keith, Firstly I am not familiar with vinux and this is the list for orca, so you may find that looking at the vinux website and lists may give better answers for vinux specific issues. Visit www.vinux.org.uk for the vinux website and list. How to start GNOME in vinux is certainly a vinux issue. Having said that I will briefly give you a bit of information on the basics of Linux and how they fit together. Firstly there are the different Linux distributions to discuss. A distribution is a bundle of software packages already configured which you may install. Distributions tend to provide similar software packages, but you may find that there default settings are tweaked for a particular use. As an example the vinux distribution has been configured to have accessibility enabled by default. There are some distributions like Debian and Fedora (to name two of many) which are called general distributions which means they can be put to many uses and possibly have some installation options to allow installation of packages of interest for a particular use (eg. you might be able to specify at install time that it is for a desktop or webserver and then the most commonly used packages for that use are installed). One distribution I will give special treatment is opensolaris. I give it special treatment here as it is not Linux, its based on another unix system called solaris. This means that things may work slightly differently on it, it may support different hardware and some linux software may not be available, although there is a significant number of similarities between Linux and Solaris (moving Linux to Solaris is probably less of a move than windows to Linux). I think a significant amount of orca development happens on opensolaris and what I have seen of opensolaris the integration of accessibility seems to be good. The choice of distribution can be a very personal decision as all needs are different and what suits one person may not suit another, best advice is generally to look at what they offer, try a few and make your own mind up. Now I will mention gnome. On Linux (I believe also applies to opensolaris) there are a variety of GUI desktop environments available but currently the only one where orca works well is gnome. The main graphical toolkit which applications written for gnome use is called GTK and genreally if you find an application using GTK it is accessible (some exceptions exist, those image editing applications are not to the point where drawing an image is accessible, etc). There are some other graphical toolkits which are accessible with orca, eg. java swing applications when using the java access bridge (this is planned to be replaced with the java-atk-wrapper which will also provide access to java swing applications), gecko applications (eg. firefox and thunderbird), etc. Unfortunately there are some toolkits which don't make use of the accessibility API used in gnome and in these cases the application is totally inaccessible to orca. An exampl of this is QT and as skype uses QT the default skype interface is inaccessible (there is meant to be some work arounds using plugins for other messaging clients). There are plans to alter the internals of AT-spi (the accessibility API used in gnome) to make it possible for some other graphical toolkits to be accessible to orca, but that is stuff for the future. One thing you may find useful while learning about Linux is to use a search engine effectively as there is lots of information out on the web about Linux. I hope this helps you in starting out with Linux. Michael Whapples On -10/01/37 20:59, Keith Christian wrote:
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